Brain is the industry standard name for a computer virus that was released in its first form in January 1986, and is considered to be the first computer virus for MS-DOS. It infects the boot sector of storage media formatted with the DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. Brain was written by two brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi, from Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
When the brothers began to receive a large number of phone calls from people in United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere, demanding that they disinfect their machines, they were stunned and tried to explain to the outraged callers that their motivation had not been malicious. Their phone lines were overloaded. The brothers with another brother Shahid Farooq Alvi are still in business in Pakistan as Brain NET Internet service providers with a company called Brain Telecommunication Limited.
In 2011, 25 years after Brain was released, Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure travelled to Pakistan to interview Amjad for a documentary. Being inspired by this documentary and its wide spread, a group of Pakistani bloggers interviewed Amjad, under the banner of Bloggerine.
No comments:
Post a Comment